Petrona Morrison

JamaicaJuly 2000Mixed Media/Installation

Petrona Morrison was born in Manchester, Jamaica in 1954. She received her initial art training in Canada, at McMaster University, where she graduated in 1976. She left Jamaica again in the mid 1980s for MFA studies at Howard University, which involved a year in Kenya, and subsequently lived between Jamaica and the USA, where she was artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem from 1994 to 1995. She returned to Jamaica in 1995 but travels regularly for exhibitions

By the late 1990s, Morrison’s interest in articulating ritual spaces resulted in room-sized installations that were at first constructed from the recuperation materials she had used in her earlier assemblages but gradually shifted to other, less materially dense media such as medical x-rays, placed in front of light boxes, and other ready-made images, often combined with a few evocative found or constructed objects. Her work also became more concerned with the here and now, referring to events in her own life and the social tensions in Jamaican society.